Let Your Fingers Do the Clicking

In March of 2005, I attended the Search Engine Strategies New York conference. I came away with pages and pages of notes and months worth of ideas to work on here at Newfangled. Among all of this information, one thing in particular will affect small to mid-size advertising agencies and design firms the most. Local search is replacing the Yellow Pages as the preferred way to find local businesses and services.

If you're reading this newsletter, you must have a browser open. Before we proceed, I want to show you something neat. Click this link to go to maps.google.com. Before I make my main point, go ahead and play with it a bit. It's VERY cool! It is so much better than MapQuest. You can pan in real-time and zoom in to any level you want. No more clicking to move right or left, no more waiting for the screen to redraw. If you zoom in far enough, you'll see that the street names display right inside the streets...no more trying to figure out which street label is meant for which street. Okay, that's enough fun for now.

Next, I want you to zoom to where your office is located. Maybe display the map so that your entire town fills the map. Now, in the search bar type in "pizza" and hit enter.

How do you like that? Little balloons pointing to every spot on the map where there's a pizza place near you. You've got to be pretty impressed...I know I was (of course, I am easily amused). I'm sure you'll want to play around with this more; for example, you might want to type in "graphic design" or "advertising agency" and see what shows up, but allow me to move on to my main point first.

Another important way that online local search exceeds the usefulness of the Yellow Pages is that you don't have to know the right category in order to find a vendor; just type in the product or service you are looking for and voilà!...a list of providers appears. For example, you don't have to type in "printers" or "printing" to find a place to have wedding invitations made. Just type in "wedding invitations" and it will show you where you can get them.

I guess you can use those hefty yellow tree-killers as stepping stools or doorstops. I know I won't be opening them to find a bike repair shop or music school anymore. Yellow Pages is intensely aware of how local search is going to change their world; just go to www.localsearchguide.org and you'll see how much they are paying attention to this phenomenon. Right now Google is in talks with SuperPages to cooperate in this regard. I predict some significant partnerships or even mergers in the not-too-distant future.

Note to readers: This article was written waaaay back in 2005! Since then, all kinds of things have happened—social media, iPhones and iPads, etc.—but websites are still command central for marketing. For a more updated look at the importance of websites, check out our article on how in the future, websites will still be important.

The main point: how this will radically affect you

I don't remember the exact figures from the Jupiter Media presentation about the advertising spending of small, local companies that currently buy most of their advertising in the yellow pages, but it was a big number. To get an idea of just how big this number is, try to picture your Yellow Pages and estimate the number of ads that represent local companies and services. Multiply that by the number of Yellow Pages for each metropolitan area in the United States and you'll start to get an idea of how big this really is. Interestingly, only 50% of the local companies represented in the yellow pages currently even have a website. What do you think will happen as fewer and fewer people use the printed Yellow Pages in favor of local web search? Do you think these small local companies will continue to pay as much for their Yellow Page ads since fewer and fewer people will be using them? Where do you think their advertising dollars will go? They will go to the place where people are searching...the search engines.

If they start spending part of their advertising money for online ads instead of Yellow Page ads, do you suppose they will want a website to follow up with their online ad? You bet! Until now, a website was only marginally useful to fifty percent of local companies. Now a website will be a standard part of their marketing.

This is good news for me... after all, I own a web development company... but it is also good news for you.

There is a massive number of local companies that are going to start asking someone about setting up a website to link to from their online local search listing. I think they are very likely to call local advertising agencies and design firms for help. And it will be easy for them to find you, since all they have to do is type "graphic designer" into Google's local search. Your company will be listed along with all your local competitors... unless your site is built in Flash, in which case it is quite possibly invisible to search engines and probably not listed (but that's another newsletter!).

When they call you, are you going to tell them that you don't do websites? Are you going to be able to tell them how much it costs to build small business websites? What if they want to be able to update the content themselves? What if they need e-commerce? What if they want to be able to track the clicks that result from paid local search ads? Are you ready?

My guess is that for many of you, the answer is no. But that's okay. Newfangled's mission is to: "fortify advertising agencies and design firms to confidently, comfortably, and profitably offer web development services to their clients." We've been partnering with companies just like yours when your clients ask for a website that requires more than Dreamweaver or Flash can deliver. We can help.

While I was at the SES conference, I attended a session in which the top engineers for the five most popular search engines were asked to look into the future in terms of where search would be in five years. They all demonstrated some really cool things. But the last question addressed to all five was this: "Among all the future search engine research and development what is the most current advance in search that will affect how people use search engines in the next six months?" One by one, all five experts responded with the same answer: "Local search."

I encourage you to not only be ready for this change, but to actually take initiative and show your clients the value that even a simple website will be to them with regard to local search. Give them a heads up that the money they are planning to spend this year on their Yellow Page ad won't be as valuable as it has been in previous years... I bet they would appreciate hearing you explain that to them.

Evaluating local companies - If you were using local search to look for a plumber, how would you evaluate the ten plumbers listed? Helping a local service stand out is mostly about establishing trust and confidence. Answering a potential customer's many questions is a great way to do that. A website can be extremely helpful with answering a customer's preliminary questions. A relatively robust FAQ page, sprinkled with a few positive testimonials can easily set one plumber (or design firm) above another. People can find local companies and services, as well as evaluate and compare them easily.

Converting online research into offline sales - Sometimes when we are looking to purchase items like car stereos, we'll begin with online research. But often, when it comes time to buy, we convert to offline sales. Sometimes this is because we want to get the item right away without waiting for it to ship, and sometimes because we want to get a tangible feel for the item before we buy it. In such cases, while we use the web to inform our buying decision, when it comes to actually buying, we go to the store. How do we find the closest store? You get the idea. Local search is now making the web just as important to the commerce of small local companies as it has been for large national and international corporations.

Pay-per-click and pay-per-call - There are also new advertising models arising in conjunction with the emergence of local search. One that I'm considering trying out is the pay-per-call method. Online retailers and travel sites have dominated the pay-per-click advertising world because certain products have a likelihood of clicks turning into purchases. Such transactions can be effectively measured and return-on-investment can be accurately determined. But for local services or companies that sell complex, higher-priced products, clicking and buying is either unlikely or impossible. Clicks have to result in calls for the sales process to even begin. Measuring return-on-investment on pay-per-click for these kinds of businesses is impossible, and so they tend to be disinterested in pay-per-click advertising. But what if you could advertise and only pay for actual phone calls that result from an online ad? New pay-per-call advertising services are just what the doctor ordered for local service, or complex or expensive product companies.

Up until now, you have been able to minimize web services for small to mid-size firms feasibly. Until now, your clients have allowed you to take this position by not placing much emphasis on their website. As a website development company dedicated to helping advertising agencies provide websites to their clients, we've had to be very patient, waiting for opportunities to develop slowly over years, not months. I admit that sometimes I wish our market for business was more aggressive in going after web projects. I know that after ten years of building hundreds of successful sites and establishing dozens of effective partnerships, if only our prospects were more aggressive with the web, both they and their clients would be extremely happy with the results. Alas, waiting patiently is the name of the game.

HOWEVER, I believe this recent change might speed things up. In fact, I hope this newsletter has persuaded you to look for opportunities to build websites for your local service clients. The changes and opportunities are too great to ignore.

Local search engines:
   maps.google.com
   local.yahoo.com
   localsearch.aol.com
   local.ask.com/local

Websites about local search:
   www.localsearchguide.org
   www.kelseygroup.com
   www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3487371